Nine lines, one sentence, not a single full stop: "Yarn" reads like a thread being pulled slowly through the fingers. Its claim is bold and simple. Our bodies are not made the way we usually say they are, but spun and woven, and the strands of that fabric are soaked in "the colour of / Madness and wild". Madness here is not an illness that visits the body from outside. It is the dye the body was made in.
The first verb matters. "Are woven" is passive, so the weaver never appears. Weaving suggests pattern and intention, yet the poem names no maker, and we are left with finished cloth and no hand behind it. The title adds a second layer. To "spin a yarn" is to tell a story, so the poem may also be saying that a self is something narrated as well as manufactured. The poem never insists on this, but the double meaning hovers behind the textile image.
The shape on the page does a lot of the work. The opening lines are short and even: "Our bodies / Are woven / Of yarn". Then the poem tightens to single words. "Whose" is left alone on its line, a small relative pronoun that normally rushes forward into its clause and here has to wait. "Strings" follows, equally isolated, and the reader is held in suspense before the sentence is allowed to continue. After that the lines widen again, from "Are all" to "Drenched in" to "The colour of", until the final line spills out with three words at once. The effect is of tension followed by release, like a thread pulled taut and then let go. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Without punctuation, the reader's own breathing decides where the pauses fall. The capital letter at the start of every line makes each fragment look like a separate strand, even though grammatically they form a single sentence.
The word choices are small but charged. Yarn is already made of fibres, so calling them "strings" is slightly odd, and the oddness is productive. Strings can be puppet strings, which suggest control, or instrument strings, which suggest music, or strings that can snap. The poem does not choose between them. "Drenched" is also stronger than "dyed" or "tinted". Dye is applied on purpose, whereas drenching is what a storm or a flood does, total and unplanned. The little word "all" in "Are all / Drenched in" rules out exceptions, as does the plural "Our". The poem does not say some of us or some of the time.
Then comes the colour. Madness has no literal colour, and the poem refuses to name one, so each reader supplies their own, perhaps a violent red or a bruised purple. This is synaesthesia in miniature, a state of mind turned into something you can see.
The ending is the most interesting choice. We expect "madness and wildness", but the poem gives us "Madness and wild". Without the suffix, "wild" feels clipped and raw, as if it had not been tamed into an abstract noun. It also echoes "the wild", meaning open country and untamed nature, so the body becomes a landscape as well as a state of mind. The sound of the word matters too. "Woven", "Whose" and "wild" all share a soft w, so the poem begins its sentence, hinges in the middle and ends on the same breathy sound, like one repeated thread through the cloth.
What makes "Yarn" worth reading is that it will not settle on a mood. "Drenched" hints at being overwhelmed, but "colour" hints at vividness, even beauty, and "wild" can mean frightening or free. Judging by the text alone, the poem is neither a lament nor a celebration. It treats unreason as part of what human beings are made of, not as a flaw in the design. It manages this in about twenty words, which is a good lesson in how line breaks, single-word lines and one stubbornly unfinished-sounding word can carry an entire view of human nature.